Terror Suspect A Nuclear Expert Kept Low Profile Until Arrest In Valley Blasts

The man who authorities believe led domestic terrorists in committing the Spokane Valley bombings and bank robberies worked for years in the nuclear industry before falling in with extremists.

Verne Jay Merrell was assigned to nuclear submarines in the Navy and later worked in private industry with security clearances in at least four nuclear power plants.

Merrell left the industry in the early 1980s, about the time he joined the Arizona Patriots, a group that threatened to kill a governor and plotted bombings of federal buildings and dams.

He moved to North Idaho a few years later.

“He knew all there is to know about nuclear power plants,” said one source who is familiar with Merrell’s past.

Before his arrest this month, the 51-year-old Pennsylvania native had no criminal record and kept a low profile in the Northwest.

People familiar with Merrell and his background are unwilling to be publicly identified. They say they are afraid of him and others in the anti-government movement.

Merrell has said little publicly since his arrest, other than telling a judge that “Yahweh is my defense. I will ask nothing from the state.”

But what emerges from interviews and a review of public records is the story of a well-educated man who left a lucrative career for a Spartan life dedicated to white supremacy and anti-government beliefs.

Most recently, Merrell expressed those views in articles he wrote for an anti-Semitic, pro-militia newspaper called The Jubilee.

Racist Louis Beam, who bought property near Merrell’s North Idaho home last year, also bills himself as a correspondent for The Jubilee.

Beam is an associate of Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler and advocates that small “leaderless cells” of patriots take on the “Zionist Occupied Government.”

Merrell and his friends, Charles Barbee, 44, and Robert S. Berry, 42, also of the Sandpoint area, were arrested Oct. 8 near Yakima by FBI agents who got a tip and started trailing the heavily armed trio.

Agents are looking for two or three other suspects believed involved in April and July bombings and bank robberies in the Spokane Valley.

The robbers apparently left notes that carried the symbol of the Phineas Priesthood, a shadowy white supremacy sect.

Indictments are expected in November.

Merrell remains held without bond in the Spokane County Jail, charged with eight federal crimes, including bombing and bank robbery.

They are the first felonies he’s ever faced, a check of his background shows.

Merrell was born on July 30, 1945, in Delaware County, Pa., near Philadelphia, to an upper-middle-class family. He has two older sisters and two younger brothers.

After graduating from Schwenksville High School, near Philadelphia, in 1963, Merrell joined the U.S. Navy.

He qualified for nuclear submarine duty and was assigned to the Atlantic Fleet.

He worked on nuclear submarines for 12 years before leaving the Navy.

He married while in the Navy, and he and his wife had three children before they divorced.

Once discharged, Merrell started a career in the nuclear power industry.

Merrell first went to work as a nuclear engineer at the Peach Bottom Nuclear Plant, near Delta, Pa.

He then worked for a time at Davis-Besse, a nuclear plant in Ohio, before taking a similar job in Crystal River, Fla.

He worked in Houston before going to Brazil to work on a nuclear plant under construction.

Back in the United States in the early 1980s, Merrell went to work for Bechtel Corp. building the Palo Verde Nuclear Plant about 80 miles west of Phoenix.

He left that job for unknown reasons, and moved to Snowflake, Ariz. People who knew him say he turned many of his assets into gold and then buried it on rural property.

While in the Southwest, his interests turned to the Arizona Patriots, a group that the Anti-Defamation League has described as an “anti-Semitic paramilitary gang.”

Robert J. Mathews also was a member of the Arizona Patriots before moving to Metaline Falls, Wash., and joining the Aryan Nations.

Mathews went on to form a group of neo-Nazi terrorists known as The Order, which committed assassinations, robberies and bombings before his death in December 1984.

Now, federal investigators are wondering if Merrell knew Mathews.

They’re also dusting off old files detailing the criminal activities of the Arizona Patriots, a group that is now largely disbanded.

A few of the Arizona Patriots moved to North Idaho in the late 1980s when the America’s Promise Ministries - a Christian Identity sect - moved from Phoenix to Sandpoint.

“The Arizona Patriots subscribe to the Christian Identity claim that white Anglo-Saxons are the true Israelites and that Jews are offspring of Satan,” the ADL said in a report.

From the patriots group sprang the Committee of the State of Arizona, patterned after a larger movement known as the Committee of the States, headed by the late William Potter Gale.

Aryan Nations leader Butler knew Gale and his associates.

On July 4, 1984, the committee issued “indictments” against then-Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt and other elected officials, accusing them of violating their oaths of office.

Documents from the committee warned that “any interference” with its activities would result in the “death penalty.”

The warning was signed by the group’s secretary, Verne Jay Merrell.

In December 1986, eight members of the Arizona Patriots were charged with various crimes, ranging from possessing illegal weapons to plotting to rob an armored car.

Merrell was not charged.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo